Working in tech ruined us
I honestly haven’t been feeling okay with work.
No, my job is great, I think many people would kill to be in my position and I have so many things to be thankful for.
But when I started threading the waters of UX in 2016, this wasn’t the profession I thought it’ll be.
It wasn’t this noisy, loud, and attention-seeking. It wasn’t a competition to see who earned more and who worked at the biggest companies. UX was a humble profession of practitioners who genuinely wanted to make the world a better place. Ideally quietly.
It’s because UX Design has become such a high profile job.
Perhaps I was naive. I did come into the industry knowing it’s just one profession of the many I know I’ll thread, but it was one that had a lot meaning for me personally. As someone who grew up with an neglectful upbringing, being able to serve others and be helpful brought me more joy than anything else. I definitely didn’t want to let that innocence go.
And with great luck, the money came in because it turns out being really helpful has a value that you can put dollar signs on. My natural inclination towards tech, cultivated from my childhood days tinkering with Arduino and Raspberry Pi, only fueled the path towards the money further.
Look, I understand that I’m spoiled.
Here I am writing what seems to be complaints, even when everything I’ve done has aligned with my goals and ultimately worked out in my favour. Luck and good planning does get people that far.
And yet, I am so listless when it comes to my career now. I did not sign up for the oversaturation of the industry and the literal prostitution of the skills I worked hard to cultivate.
Everyone is working for the money and hyper-focused on the gains of the industry, completely neglecting the essence of UX, design, and the value of craftsmanship.
And frankly, I am disgusted by it.
The last straw on the camel’s back. It’s not news to everyone that we live in a capitalist economy. We are the generation that truly seeks to consume and live the high-life for ourselves.
Now, before you go off on me and say every generation does that, our generation does it way more. Way too much.
We gentrified the broken economy further ourselves by chasing after the rat race harder than our forefathers did. Not keeping up with the rising cost of living isn’t the fault of our laziness or the greed of a bygone generation, but rather also the fault of our greed fueled by the narrative that rewards must come with diligence.
Life, unfortunately, isn’t such a bed of roses.
Further proven by the massive, continuous layoffs in the tech scene, we really are the generation that have been spoiled for too long with too much.
“Here’s a day in my life as a tech professional” starts almost every trending shorts video about life in tech, showing off all sorts of perks of being a tech employee that was given and not earned.
This has put a lot of pressure on companies to start a “Perks & Benefits War”, and it was the race to the bottom from there on, because now everyone sees these privileges as the standard norm and expects it. But no one is actually deserving of such pristine conditions from the get-go.
And so, the culture of diligence quickly turned into a culture of laziness and entitlement.
The abuse of golden handcuffs
“Ugh, I hate that remote work isn’t a thing anymore.” A good friend of mine texted me while she was on the way to the office. The pandemic was over and everyone was called back into the office. I reminded her that she still had flexible hours, and she sent a smiley emoji as a response.
She proceeded to enjoy the free air conditioning and team lunches provided by the company, two great staples of why young Singaporeans would bother to travel down to the city to work from the heartlands.
The clock chimed at 4pm, and I got yet another text, “I’m leaving the office early for groceries, hehe!”, and once she clocked off, that was it. No work would get done at home.
I have remote work privileges, I have flexible hours, and I choose to work hard not because I am ‘stupid’ to want to work for some higher-up’s new Lamborghini, but because it is a logical unspoken rule that privileges come with hard work.
That same friend got put into a PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) not long after, and was laid off promptly. This is the unspoken reality of tech layoffs nobody wants to accept: If you’re a deadweight to the company, you will be let go.
